LAS VEGAS — Dell EMC today at VMworld 2017 unveiled hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) systems and hybrid cloud platforms integrated with VMware software.
These include two HCI systems: VxRail appliances and VxRack SDDC (software-defined data center) rack-scale systems. Both leverage VMware’s vSphere for compute and vSAN for storage.
HCI Systems
VxRail appliances are turnkey HCI systems jointly engineered with VMware. They come with PowerEdge compute and vSAN storage, and will be available in September 2017. They also come with the latest version software, VxRail 4.5. The new releases includes automation and lifecycle management for vSphere and vSAN.
“The idea is if you’re a VMware shop, this is the easiest way to get a VMware stack in an appliance, and the interoperability patches are all highly automated,” said Bob Wambach, VP of marketing, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division at Dell EMC.
The HCI appliance also includes other new enterprise features such as batch multi-node scaling. This enables automated VxRail Appliance deployment for a single appliance to be applied to multi-node expansions.
It offers new support for REST-based APIs to programmatically deliver lifecycle management software upgrades to an entire VxRail cluster at once.
And it also includes a new HCI security encryption feature with data-at-rest encryption built into vSAN 6.6.
The other new HCI system, VxRack SDDC, is geared toward larger enterprises that want to stand up a VMware-based rack-scale software defined data center environment. It is integrated with the latest versions of VMware software including VMware Cloud Foundation for automation and lifecycle management of VMware vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6 and NSX 6.3 in a single stack.
Wambach describes this system as “the big brother to VxRAil.” As opposed to buying an appliance, “you’re more buying a VMware data center in a box when you buy the VxRrack SDDC.”
Dell EMC provides single contact support for the whole system.
Hybrid Cloud Platforms
Dell EMC already offered two turnkey hybrid cloud platforms: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC), an HCI system; and Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC), developer-ready infrastructure as an on-premises, turnkey Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform for building and running cloud-native apps. Both platforms are now more tightly integrated with VMware.
EHC is now available globally on Dell EMC VxRack SDDC with VMware’s software-defined data center stack. NHC built on VxRack SDDC also is available today via an early access program.
Other new capabilities to the hybrid cloud platforms include:
- Extending multi-site support to VxRail-based deployments. This allows organizations to grow their hybrid cloud environment to up to four sites with virtual machine-level disaster recovery and management through a single portal.
- Offering Microsoft Azure as a public cloud option.
- Supporting accelerated installation of VxRack SDDC-based deployments and new automated upgrades to VxRail-based deployments. This reduces time for installation and upgrades, according to Dell EMC.
In addition to adding tighter integration with Dell EMC hardware, VMware launched several other new cloud services today at VMworld 2017 that aims to make customers’ moves between VMware-based private clouds and public clouds a more seamless experience.